Media Monitor
Agriculture Industry
Jindal Stainless, Japanese firm tie up to incubate agri-tech start-upsedit
The country’s largest stainless steel maker Jindal Stainless Ltd will establish an incubation centre for agriculture technology (agri-tech) startups in collaboration with the Japanese company Future Venture Capital Company Ltd. “The co-working space for the incubation centre will be located at our office complex at Gurgaon and alongside our office at Bhubaneswar and laboratories across intervention areas,” said Abhyuday Jindal, vice-chairman of Jindal Stainless Ltd at ‘Krisi Unnati’ organised by Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) in Bhubaneswar.
Farmers Revoltedit
A bird’s eye view of agriculture points to an anomaly. Around 77% of farmland is devoted to staples such as cereals. This results in output almost equivalent to what high value crops such as fruits and vegetables yield on less than 20% of the land. Rectifying this mismatch will solve many problems. This is where government policy has a crucial role to play. The Indian farmer has to function in an overregulated environment made worse by capricious bans on exports.
After first monsoon showers, farmers hurry to begin sowing operationsedit
Officials ask farmers to slow down the process; express fears that rain may play truant this time The first shower of monsoon keyed up the farmers in the district who desperately started tilling their land, hurrying to sow their crop. However, the officials say the rain may play truant and that the farmers need to be patient. The erstwhile Warangal district witnessed sporadic rain with agency
Karnataka farmers earn 138% by direct sale via e-tradingedit
According to officials of Ministry of Agriculture, the e-trading enhanced the income of farmers by weeding out middlemen. “They (middlemen) eat up almost 75 per cent of the final price, leaving very little for the farmers. The State-run Agricultural Produce Market Committee (APMC) often has the disadvantage of middlemen deciding the price of the produce.
No green shoots in the farm sectoredit
Our farm subsidy policy encourages the production of lowvalue staples, and the output of fruits and vegetables is not covered by the government’s minimum support price.
CM reviews Agri action plansedit
Chief Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan reviewed future action plans and preparations of Agriculture department at Mantralaya in Bhopal on Thursday. Reviewing the onion purchase arrangements, Chouhan said that onion at the rate of Rs 8 per kg will be purchased from the farmers and will be made available to poor consumers at the rate of Rs 2 per kg at PDS shops. Limit for purchase will be fixed for the consumers. It may be mentioned that about 4 hundred consumers are covered by one PDS shop.
e-NAM a non-starter in MP as crisis-hit farmers struggle to find buyersedit
As farmers in Madhya Pradesh struggle to find buyers for their bumper crop, an electronic National Agriculture Market (e-NAM), the Union government move that was designed to help them in that very task, is still a work in progress. The e-NAM is envisaged as a pan-India electronic trading portal which networks the existing APMC (Agricultural Produce Marketing Committee) wholesale markets (mandis) to create a unified national market.
If agriculture goes wrong, nothing will go right: Father of Green Revolutionedit
Amidst all the farmer protests in Madhya Pradesh and Maharashtra, the father of the Green Revolution, M S Swaminathan said that if agriculture goes wrong, nothing will go right. “Need serious attention to their long-term economic viability,” he posted on Twitter. He also said that if the government did not take care of the farmers, everything would go wrong.
Madhya Pradesh farmers protest: How partial agricultural reforms meet PM Narendra Modi’s waiveredit
When news first broke of the farmers’ agitation in the state, and of it turning violent later, the standard response was that the stories of Madhya Pradesh’s miraculous farm growth were bogus. How can, the argument went, a state where agriculture has grown at 10% annually for a decade, and at more than 14% for half this period, have such bloody violence over farmer incomes? Ashok Gulati who, at ICRIER, first highlighted MP’s prowess has been at the receiving end of many such barbs.
Climate change might help pests resist corn’s genetic weaponedit
Some commercial varieties of corn have been engineered with genes for a toxin borrowed from the bacterium Bacillus thuringiensis, known as Bt, that kills the earworms when they eat the crop. In areas with a lot of Bt corn acreage, plants defended by the Bt protein Cry1Ab suffered more earworm damage when summers grew warmer, the team reports June 7 in Royal Society Open Science.